Overtime consumes Oakland’s tax windfall, controller reports

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Oakland Police officers in motorcycles escort protesters along Broadway during a protest against the inauguration of Donald Trump in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 20, 2017. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

OAKLAND — The bump in revenue going into city coffers thanks to a strengthening local economy is being almost swallowed up by higher-than-anticipated overtime costs at the police and fire departments, the latest figures prepared by the city controller show.

As City Hall prepares budget deliberations for fiscal 2017-18, new reports from the controller’s bureau project that revenue for the current fiscal year — based on second-quarter activity — will have exceeded projections by $15.95 million.

The increased revenue is primarily because of the strong real estate market that produced $9.28 million more than expected in property taxes and $8.88 million more in real estate transfer taxes.

But expenditures are way higher than projected too, by $16.83 million. The city is on pace to spend $56.22 million on overtime costs, $35.34 million more than budgeted.

Of that $35.34 million, the police department went $12.76 million over budget and the fire department went $20.1 million, according to a series of reports prepared by Interim Controller Kirsten LaCasse.

“We’re unable to budget for crowd management events that happen in Oakland,” said Tim Birch of the police chief’s office, citing the unpredictable nature of unplanned events.

On the other hand, he said, pointing to Mayor Libby Schaaf and former Police Chief Sean Whent’s December 2015 participation in a White House forum on policing, “We receive national recognition for our crowd management methods.

“There are not a lot of police departments that have the amount of experience that Oakland does in civil protests,” he said, citing the city’s “rich history of civil protests” and this year’s women’s march and inauguration protests as good examples of Oakland police having mastered the work of crowd management.

“It wound up being no big deal. There were no incidents of any kind,” he said.

LaCasse’s report attributes the police department estimated overspending of $12.76 million largely to “overtime related to backfill, extension of shift and unanticipated special enforcement, such as the election protests.

Beyond that, “the estimated overspending can be attributed to increased cost of repairing vehicles and a decrease in civilian vacancies,” the report says.

It breaks down $26.93 million spent for police overtime into four categories: protests and special enforcement ($5.17 million); reimbursable events ($3.82 million); coverage of vacancies ($7.75 million); and routine overtime ($10.19 million).

Those figures all represent a doubling of what was actually spent in the last six months of 2016, leaving open the possibility that activity in the first six month of 2017 could affect the fiscal year total.

The fire department also vastly exceeded projected overtime, by more than $20 million. For fiscal 2016-17, the fire department is projected to spend $21.59 million on overtime when it was budgeted just $1.49 million.

The reports do not specify why the fire department’s overtime budget was exceeded, and neither fire department officials nor LaCasse returned repeated calls for comment.

Of the city’s $549.92 million of budgeted general fund expenditures, almost 43 percent, $234.22 million, was allocated for police. The fire department budget was $127.21 million, which it exceeded by only $6.4 million despite having that $20.1 million in excess overtime costs.

The report explains the $6.4 million overage as “primarily due to overtime for backfilling an average of 73 sworn vacant positions to achieve mandated staff levels.” Additionally, there was backfill for seven firefighters temporarily assigned for 20 weeks to the Training & Support Services Division to teach at the unbudgeted 18-week fire academy, which started Dec. 19 with 37 trainees.